Shooting Stars Omnibus: Cinnamon, Ice, Rose and Honey

Summary

FOUR GIRLS TOUCHED BY SPECIAL GIFTS. FOUR STUNNING NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERS -- - TOGETHER FOR THE FIRST TIME

Cinnamon...She escaped her family's turmoil by dreaming of imaginary worlds. But it's her talent for the theater that gives Cinnamon a chance...to truly escape. Ice...To her mother's dismay, she was a silent wallflower, not a social butterfly. Now, her secret gift -- her solid-gold singing voice -- may become her saving grace. Rose...When she danced, she could dream -- and when her father's secrets threatened to destroy her world, a most unlikely person gives Rose the courage to follow her heart. Honey...Raised on her strict grandfather's farm, her natural-born talent for the violin gave her a new life -- and love with a handsome soul mate. Will a shocking revelation shatter her newfound happiness?

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Shooting Stars Omnibus - V.C. Andrews

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Honey

Cinnamon

Prologue

"Cinnamon Carlson."

I was just as surprised as everyone else to hear Miss Hamilton call out my name. Edith Booth, the student hall monitor and everyone’s candidate for this year’s Miss Goody Two-shoes, had just interrupted our English literature class. She had opened the door and tapped her perfect little steps across the hardwood floor while walking with flawless posture. Her shoulders were pulled back firmly, and an invisible book was on top of her clump of dull brown hair, hair that everyone knew her mother trimmed unevenly at the base of her neck and around her ears.

She had looked in my direction as soon as she had entered the classroom and then handed Miss Hamilton the note from the principal’s office as if it were a speeding ticket or an eviction notice. I wanted to crack an egg over that smug, arrogant little smile she had pasted on her face.

Miss Hamilton’s face was already flushed with crimson frustration at the interruption. She had just gotten into the flow of Desdemona’s pathetic defense right before Othello was about to smother her to death with a pillow. Even some of the zombies in class, as Clarence Baron and I liked to refer to them, were glued to her performance. What could you expect? It was practically the only live theater some of them had ever experienced.

After having once made a futile effort to become an actress, Miss Hamilton had fallen back into a teaching career like someone who had tried to ski professionally and quickly found herself on her rear end gliding down into mediocrity. She spent the rest of her young adult life gazing wistfully at the skiers who went gracefully beyond her. Now, in the role of the school’s drama coach, she dreams of being the inspiration, the greatest influence on the next Meryl Streep or Jodie Foster. Lately, she’s been eyeing me, urging me to try out for the school play, which was something Mommy thought I should do as well because of the role-playing she and I often perform in the attic of our house.

You’re so good at it, Cinnamon, she would tell me. Someday, you’ll be a wonderful actress.

You have to be a wonderful actress or actor to survive in this world, I thought. Controlling your face, your voice, your posture and most of all being able to invent reasons and excuses to answer questions are the real skills of self-defense. To me, especially lately, going out in the world with honesty on your lips was the same as going out naked.

I looked up when I heard the door open and Miss Hamilton pause. While she had been reciting her Desdemona, I had kept my eyes glued to the top of my desk. Her over-the-top histrionics was embarrassing to watch, and I really liked Othello. Listening to Miss Hamilton read it was similar to being forced to observe someone ruin a good recipe for crème brûlée. Everyone who hadn’t eaten the dessert before would think this was it, this terrible tasting stuff was it? They would never ask for it again.

I knew instinctively that Desdemona at this point in the play should still not believe it was possible Othello would kill her. Her voice should ring with disbelief, innocence, love and faith. Why didn’t Miss Hamilton know that, or if she did, why couldn’t she express it?

How many times had Shakespeare spun in his grave?

I liked Miss Hamilton, probably more than any of my other teachers, but I was never good at overlooking faults. I always flip over the brightest coin and look at the tarnish.

Your grandmother is waiting for you at Mr. Kaplan’s office, Miss Hamilton said.

I looked back at Clarence Baron who was practically the only one my age with whom I communicated these days. I hesitated to call him my boyfriend. We hadn’t crossed that line yet and I was still not sure at the time if we ever would. That wasn’t because I thought he was unattractive. Quite the contrary. He had an interesting face with dark, lonely eyes that revealed not only his sensitivity but also his intelligence. He kept his chocolate brown hair long and unruly, full of wild curls. I knew he thought it made him resemble Ludwig van Beethoven, not that Clarence had any interest in composing music. He just enjoyed classical music and knew more about it than anyone else I knew.

He was slim, almost too thin for his six feet one inch height, but I liked his angular jaw and nearly perfect nose over a strong full mouth. I’ve overheard girls often commenting about him, always saying things like Too bad he’s so weird. He’s sexy.

I knew why they thought he was weird. He admitted that he couldn’t help doing what he called his rituals. For example, Clarence was in the last seat in the first row. It was a very important thing for him to take the same seat in all of his classes, if he could. I suppose it was really compulsion. Another ritual was never leaving a building on an odd step. He counted his steps toward the exit and always made sure he walked out on an even number. I’ve often seen him stop and go back just to be sure. He also eats everything on his dinner plate from left to right, no matter what it is, and he’s right-handed! He even manages to do it with pasta. I don’t ask him why he does these strange things anymore. If I did, he would just say, It feels right, or he would shrug and say, I don’t know why, Cinnamon. I just do it.

Clarence raised his heavy, dark brown eyebrows into question marks and I sucked in my breath and shook my head.

I had no idea why my grandmother was coming to take me out of school, but I did have fears boiling under the surface of my confusion.

Two days ago, Mommy had suffered her second miscarriage. After the first miscarriage eight years ago, she and Daddy seemed to have given up on having another child. I even harbored the belief that they had stopped having sex. Rarely did I see them express any passion toward each other, especially after Grandmother Beverly had moved in with us. A peck on the cheek, a quick embrace or a brush of hands was generally all I witnessed, not that I spied on my parents or anything. It was just an observation of something that had settled into their lives and mine, seeping through our days like a cold, steady rain.

So I was just as surprised as my grandmother when one day a little more than six months ago, Mommy made the announcement at dinner.

After swallowing a piece of bread, she released a deep sigh and said, Well, I’m pregnant again.

Grandmother Beverly, who had moved in with us shortly after Grandfather Carlson had died, dropped her fork on the plate, nearly breaking the dish. She turned and looked at my father as if he had betrayed some trust, some agreement in blood they had signed.

At her age? she asked him. She’s going to have another child now? She turned to my mother, who had always had the ability to ignore Grandmother Beverly, to seem not to hear her or see her whenever she wanted, even if she was sitting or standing right in front of her. She could go as deaf and as stony as a marble statue. Of course, that made Grandmother Beverly even angrier.

You’re forty-two years old, Amber. What are you thinking? she snapped with her same old authority.

Grandmother Beverly has never hesitated to express her opinions or make her demands. My grandfather had been a meek, gentle man whose strongest criticism or chastisement of her was a shaking of his head and only twice at that. He went left to right, left to right and stopped with a shrug and that was always the extent of his resistence. No arguments, no pouts, no rants or raves or anything added. Once, when I tried to describe him to Clarence, I dryly said, Think of him as Poland after Hitler’s invasion.

It was not difficult for me to think of Grandmother Beverly as a ruthless dictator.

What I’m thinking, Mommy replied slowly to Grandmother Beverly’s question, is that I’ll give birth to a healthy child. Besides, it’s not so uncommon these days for a woman my age to give birth. I recently read where a woman in her fifties got pregnant. And not as a surrogate mother either, she quickly added.

Grandmother Beverly’s eyes darkened and narrowed with disapproval. She picked up her fork and returned to her methodical eating, gazing furiously at my father who busied himself with cutting his steak. After that, silence boomed in our ears as loudly as Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

However, silence was no sign of surrender when it came to my grandmother. She never missed an opportunity to express her disapproval. All through Mommy’s months of pregnancy, Grandmother Beverly nagged and nipped at her like a yapping poodle. As soon as Mommy started to show, Grandmother’s complaints intensified.

A woman your age walking around in maternity clothes, she barked. What a sight you must make. You even have some strands of gray in your hair, and now you have to watch what you eat more than ever. Women at your age gain weight more easily. You’ll end up looking like my sister Lucille who popped children out like a rabbit and ended up resembling a baby elephant. Her hips grew so big, she once got stuck in a chair, Grandmother emphasized, looking at me and nodding.

Whenever she couldn’t get a reaction from Mommy, she would try directing herself at me as if I were a translator who would explain what she had said.

Aunt Lucille has only three children, doesn’t she? I asked.

That’s too many, Grandmother Beverly replied so quickly anyone would have thought she and I had rehearsed the dialogue. "Children are expensive and difficult nowadays. They make you years older than you are in short order. They need, need, need. When I was a child, the word want did not exist. My mouth was stuffed with ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and ‘no sir’ and ‘yes ma’am’ and that was that. I can’t even imagine my father’s reaction to my asking him for a new dress or a car or money to waste on silly jewelry. Why if he was alive today and saw some of those…I don’t know what you call them…walking around with rings in their noses and in their belly buttons, he’d think the world had come to an end and rightly so."

Well, they’ll be only two children in this house, I said and looked at Mommy. She was trying hard not to pay attention, but Grandmother Beverly was wearing her down, her snipping words coming at her from every direction like a pack of hyenas. By now Mommy was full of aches and pains and too pale, I thought.

And then she suffered the miscarriage. She started to hemorrhage one night and had to be rushed to the hospital. I woke to the sounds of her screams and panic. Daddy wouldn’t let me go along. He came home alone hours and hours later and announced she had lost the baby.

Grandmother Beverly felt no guilt or sorrow. Her reaction was to claim it was Nature’s way of saying no to something that shouldn’t have been begun in the first place. When they brought Mommy home the day after, Mommy couldn’t bear to look at her. She didn’t look at anyone very much for that matter, not even me. Her eyes were distant, her sorrow shutting her up tightly, a prisoner in her own body.

Now I trembled inside imagining the possible reasons for my grandmother’s very unexpected arrival at school.

Quickly closing my copy of Othello and my notebook, I gathered all of my things and rose. I knew everyone in the class was watching me, their eyes loyally following my every gesture, but most of my life I’ve felt people’s eyes on me. It doesn’t bother me anymore. In fact, it probably never did or at least never as much as it should. That indifference, or that dramatic fourth wall, as Miss Hamilton likes to call it, was always up, always between me and the rest of the world whenever I wanted it to be. In that sense I’m really like Mommy, although I must say, Daddy can be deaf and dumb at the drop of a nasty word, too. He certainly was that way more often around Grandmother Beverly these days.

I know that people, including some of my teachers and especially my grandmother, would say I deliberately attract attention because of the way I dress and behave. My auburn hair is thick and long, down to my shoulder blades. I won’t cut it any shorter than that and barely trim my bangs. Sometimes, strands fall over my eyes or over one eye and I leave them there, looking out at the world, my teachers, other students, everything and everyone through a sheer, rust-tinted curtain. I know it unnerves some people and especially drives Grandmother Beverly to the point where her pallid face takes on crimson blotches at the crests of her bony cheeks.

Cut your hair or at least have the decency to brush it back neatly. I can’t tell if you’re looking at me or what when I speak to you, she often carped. One criticism led to another. She was a spider weaving its web. And don’t you have anything cheerful to wear to school?

Like Mommy, I favor dark colors. I’m always dressed in black or dark blue, often dark gray, and I put on a translucent white lipstick and black nail polish. I darken my eyebrows and wear too much eyeshadow, and I keep out of the sun, not only because I know it damages your skin, but I like having a light complexion. My skin is so transparent, I can see tiny blue veins in my temples, and I think about my blood moving through these tiny wires to my heart and my brain.

At the moment, my heart felt as though it had been put on pause.

Edith Booth waited for me at the classroom door. She was performing her role as hall monitor, which meant she would escort me out and to the principal’s office like some military parade guard. She pressed her thin, crooked lips together and pulled her head up, tightening her neck and her chin. She held the door open, but as I walked through it, I reached back, seized the knob and pulled it hard out of her hands, slamming it behind me.

I could hear the class roar at the sight of her staring into the shut door, her jaw probably dropped, her perfect posture definitely ruined. I heard her fumbling with the knob and then come charging out, flustered, rushing to catch up with me, her heels clicking like an explosion of small firecrackers on the tile corridor floor.

That wasn’t very nice, she said.

I turned and glared at her.

Everyone who knows us and who has seen our house thinks the spirits inside the house will eventually drive us all mad. They think it’s haunted. They call it The Addams Family House. The outside is so dark and it does have this foreboding presence. I actually believe Daddy is ashamed of his house. Grandmother Beverly certainly didn’t want him to buy it, but that was one time Mommy won out over her when it came to having Daddy decide something. Mommy was determined.

It’s a grand Second Empire Victorian house about ten miles northwest of Tarrytown, New York. The original owner was a former Civil War officer who had served under General Grant. His name was Jonathan Demerest and he had five children, two boys and three girls. Both his wife Carolyne and his youngest son Abraham died of smallpox less than a year apart. Their graves, as well as Jonathan’s, are on our property, up on a knoll from where you could once see miles and miles in any direction. At least that’s what Mommy claimed. She said when they first moved into the house, the forest wasn’t anywhere as grown as it is today; of course, there weren’t all those houses in one development after another peppering the face of the landscape like pimples.

It was a peaceful place, a wonderful place to be buried, she told me. It still is, actually. Maybe I should be buried here, too, she added and I cried because I was only nine at the time and I didn’t want to hear about such a thing as my own mother’s death.

We all die, Cinnamon, she said with that soft, loving smile that could always bring my marching heart back to a slow walk. She would touch my cheek so gently, her fingers feeling like a warm caressing breeze, and she would smile a smile full of candlelight, warm, mesmerizing. It’s not that bad when our time comes. We just move on, she said looking out at the world below us as if she already had one foot in the grave. We just move on to somewhere quieter. That’s all.

Quieter? How could it be any quieter than this? I wondered aloud.

It’s quieter inside you, she replied. I didn’t understand what that meant for years, but now I do.

I really do.

Anyway, Mommy told me she had fallen in love with our house before she had fallen in love with Daddy, and she got him to buy it after only a year of marriage.

The house appears larger than it really is because it was built on a hill and looms over the roads and homes below us. It has three stories with a cupola that looks like a great hiding place for a monster or a ghost. Some of the kids think I crawl up into it every night and send spells and curses down on unwary travelers below. Whenever I hear these kinds of things about myself, I laugh, toss back my hair and say what Mommy told me Katharine Hepburn once said about publicity: I don’t care what they say about me, as long as it isn’t true.

Very few people understand what that means. They think it’s just more proof of my weirdness. They don’t understand that when people invade your life and uncover the truth about you, they expose things you want to keep private, keep personal so you can keep your self-respect. It’s why we lock our doors and close our windows and pull down our shades, especially in my house.

I don’t care what impression my house makes on people. I love it as much as Mommy does. Second Empire houses have what are known as mansard roofs, which are roofs having two slopes on all sides with the lower slope steeper than the upper one. The house itself is square, and it has elaborate decorative iron cresting above the upper cornice. The front of the house has paired entry doors with glass in the top half and a half-dozen steps leading up and under the one-story porch. All of the windows are paired. The downstairs ones are all hooded. Mommy loves talking about it, lecturing about the architecture to anyone who will listen.

Grandmother Beverly thought it was a dreadful place to live, even though she readily moved in with us. Mommy said it was Grandmother Beverly’s sole idea to move in, despite Daddy’s telling me and everyone else that he asked her to move in with us since we had so much room and there was no reason for a woman of her age to have to live alone.

No reason, Mommy told me, except to give us peace of mind.

Anyway people often look at me as if they expect that any day now—because we live in the eerie looking, supposedly haunted house—I’ll become a raving lunatic and maybe even try to hurt myself. Even when some of my teachers talk to me, I notice they stand a foot or so farther away from me than they stand away from their other students. All I have to do sometimes is stare at someone the way I was staring at Edith Booth and I can see him or her suddenly become overwhelmed with small terrors. The truth is, I’ve begun to enjoy it. It gives me a sense of power.

What? I snapped at her.

She stepped back.

Mr. Kaplan…wants you…right away, she stuttered.

Then stop interrupting me, I ordered. I locked my eyes onto hers and the color fled her cheeks.

She remained a few feet behind me all the way to the principal’s office where I found Grandmother Beverly sitting anxiously on the small, imitation leather settee. She was rubbing her fingers in her palm as if she were trying to sand down some imaginary calluses, something she often did when she was very nervous.

The moment I entered the outer office, she rose to her full five feet four inches of height. Grandfather Carlson had been six feet two inches tall, but he always looked diminished in her presence, and Daddy never seems his full six feet next to her either. Her shadow shrinks people.

Stature comes from your demeanor, your self-confidence, Mommy once told me when we talked about Grandmother Beverly. You’ve got to give the devil her due for that.

Mommy was practically the only person I knew who wasn’t intimidated by her, but she wasn’t strong enough to do constant battle with her, not with what I’ve come to think of as the Trojan Horse in our home, my own father. He could be strong in so many ways, but when it came to facing down his own mother, he became a little boy again.

For instance, Grandmother Beverly was as critical of the inside of our house as she was of the outside. She hated Mommy’s taste in decorations, furniture, curtains, flooring, even lighting and bathroom fixtures. From the moment she moved in, she seemed determined to slowly change it all. She would point out the smallest imperfection, a tiny stain in a chair, a tear in a rug, and advised Daddy to have it replaced. Once he agreed to that, she went forward to choose what the replacement would be, as if Mommy wasn’t even there.

One day a chair would be supplanted or a rug, and when Mommy complained that what Grandmother Beverly had chosen didn’t mesh with our decor, Daddy would plead and moan and promise that after this or that there would be no more changes. Of course, there always were.

It was easy to see why I compared Grandmother’s march through our house and lives to Hitler’s march through Europe. Daddy was our own little Chamberlain promising Peace for our time, if we just made one more compromise. Then we would be a happy little family again.

That’s something we would never be again.

But I didn’t know how definite that prophecy was until I went home from school with Grandmother Beverly.

1

Darkness Descends

"What’s wrong? Why have you come for me?" I asked her.

Once I had arrived, she had simply started out of the principal’s office and begun her stomp through the corridor to the exit for the parking lot. As usual she expected me to trail along like some obedient puppy.

She continued to walk, ignoring my questions. She always fixed herself on her purpose or destination as if she were a guided missile. Getting her to pause, turn or stop required the secret abort code only her own private demon knew and was reluctant to relinquish or reveal. You just had to wait her out, calm yourself down and be patient as difficult as that was. Grandmother Beverly could spread droplets of poison frustration on everyone around her like a lawn sprinkler.

But this was different. She had ripped me out of school and sent my head spinning. I would not be denied.

Grandmother?

Just let’s get out of here, she said sharply, not looking at me. She lowered her voice and added, I don’t want anyone hearing about this, if I can help it.

Your foolish father, she muttered. I warned him. No one can say I didn’t warn him.

We passed through the doors and headed toward her vintage Mercedes sedan.

Grandmother, I cried, planting my feet firmly in the parking lot. I’m not taking another step until you tell me exactly what is going on.

She paused finally and turned to me, hoisting those small shoulders like a cobra preparing for a deadly strike.

Your mother has gone mad and you’re the only one who can talk to her. I certainly can’t. Of course, I can’t reach your father, she said, and there’s no time to wait for him anyway. I don’t want to call an ambulance if I can help it.

Ambulance?

You know how one thing leads to another and in this community there’s enough gossip about this family as it is, she continued. Maybe you can get her to stop.

Stop what?

I can’t even begin to describe it, she said, wagging her head as if her hair had been soaked. Let’s just get home, she insisted and hurried to get into the car. Now that she had sharpened my curiosity and raised the level of my anxiety like mercury in a thermometer, I rushed to get in as well.

Once I was seated, my head bowed with the panic I felt.

I must tell you, she continued after starting the engine and pulling away from the school parking lot, "I have always felt your mother was unbalanced. She had tendencies I spotted from the first moment I set eyes on her. I warned Taylor about her minutes after he had brought her around for me and your grandfather to meet her.

She was coming to see us for the first time, but she wore no makeup, draped herself in what looked to be little more than a black sheet, kept her hair miles too long like you do and had enough gloom in her eyes to please a dozen undertakers. She could have worked constantly as a professional mourner. I could count on my fingers how many times I’ve seen a smile on that face, and even if she did smile at me, it was the smile of a madwoman, her eyes glittering like little knives, her wry lips squirming back and into the corners of her cheeks like worms in pain. How many times have I asked myself what he could possibly have seen in such a woman?

I had heard a similar lecture before.

Maybe he was in love, Grandmother.

Love, she spat as if the word put a bitter taste in her mouth. How could he be in love with her?

She glanced at me and then put her eyes back on the road. She was a good driver for someone in her early seventies, I thought, but then again, she was good at everything she did. Failure wasn’t in her personal vocabulary.

"Your mother was certainly never what I would call beautiful. I’m not saying she doesn’t have pleasing features, because she does, but she does nothing to enhance them. In fact, what she does is diminish them just like you do with that silly makeup you wear.

Of course, it didn’t help that she had the personality of a pallbearer. Believe me, she said, that takes the light from your eyes, the glow from your smile. It’s no wonder to me that she never made any friends. Who wants to listen to the music she likes or read those poems about loss and death and insanity? She has no social graces, doesn’t care about nice clothes or jewelry. She was never interested in your father’s work or helped him meet business associates.

Then what do you think it was, Grandmother, I asked dryly, a magic spell?

You think you’re being facetious, I know, but let me tell you that woman can cast spells of sorts. I’ll tell you what it was, she said, after a short pause, never wanting to admit to not knowing something. She was probably his first love affair. Men, foolish men, often mistake sexual pleasure for love. Sex is like good food. You can eat it with anyone, Cinnamon. Remember that, she ordered.

Then what’s love? I asked her.

Love is commitment, responsibility, dedication. It requires maturity.

Sounds boring, I said. If that’s love, I’ll take good food.

She opened her mouth wide and glared at me, shaking her head.

You’d better be careful of your thoughts, she admonished. Insanity can be inherited, you know. The genes from our side of the family just might not be enough.

I wanted to laugh at her, but I kept thinking about what awaited me and how it might make her right.

No one could tell anything about the inhabitants of our home by simply driving up, especially this time of the day. The front faced east so that all morning the windows were turned into glittering slabs, impenetrable crystals, twisting, turning and reflecting the sunlight. In fact, if it wasn’t a day for the gardeners, and today wasn’t, there was a look of abandonment about the place. Our cars were always left in the rear, out of sight. Two tall weeping willows on the northeast end painted long shadows over one side of the structure, adding to the sense of desertion.

There was a swing under a maple tree to the right on the west side. I noticed it was going back and forth, which made me smile. Anyone looking at it would be convinced there was a ghost sitting on it. I imagined one myself, one of the Demerest girls, smiling.

Fall had just lifted its head and begun to blow the cooler winds over the landscape, waving a magical hand to change the greens into yellows, browns and oranges. The grass, however, seemed happier, waking to heavier dews every morning. It was a deeper green. I loved the aroma of freshly cut lawns, the freshness traveled into my brain and washed away the cobwebs and shadows from my darker thoughts.

As Grandmother Beverly turned up the drive, she finally revealed the situation in detail.

"I was in the living room, watching a good Cary Grant movie, when I heard her humming in the hallway. What is she doing downstairs? I wondered. The doctor had specifically told her that if she was going home, she was to remain in bed, resting, getting stronger. I offered to be her nurse, to march up and down those stairs as many times as need be, so she couldn’t use that as any excuse.

But your mother never listens to wiser voices. She hears only what she wants to hear. Secret voices out of the shadows, she muttered.

Anyway, I went to the family room doorway. At first, I didn’t see her. Then I heard her talking to her plants.

She paused, smirked and shook her head.

Mommy often spoke aloud to her plants as if they were her little children. She said when she was sad, which was far too often, the leaves were limp and dreary, but when she was happy, they were crisp and alive.

Anyway, I didn’t think much of that.

She’s always talking to flowers, Grandmother. Many people do that.

Naked?

What?

She was standing there in the hallway, watering those plants naked, and she was using a bed pan to water them, she said, her voice rising. Who even knows if it was water?

I felt the blood drain a bit from my face and looked at the house as we started around back.

But that wasn’t the horror of it, Cinnamon. ‘What are you doing, Amber?’ I asked, and she turned slowly toward me, a crazed smile on her face.

Grandmother stopped the car and turned to me before shutting off the engine.

Over her stomach, with a stick of red lipstick, she had drawn the outline of a baby, a fetus! she cried with a grimace. "I screamed, ‘Oh, my God!’ I nearly fainted at the sight, but she continued to smile at me and then went back to watering the plants, humming and watering.

So, I got into the car and went for you.

I swallowed back the rock that had risen into my throat and got out of the car. All I could think of was Ophelia’s mad scene in Hamlet. With my head down, my feet feeling like they had turned into marshmallows, I charged toward the rear entrance and quickly went inside, through the rear entryway and down the corridor to the stairway, gazing in each room to be sure Mommy wasn’t downstairs.

Then I pounded up the stairs and paused when I reached the top. I could hear her humming and talking to herself. It was coming from the room that had been set up to be the nursery. Slowly, I approached it and looked in. It was just as Grandmother Beverly had described: Mommy was naked, the imaginary baby crudely drawn over her stomach in her apple red lipstick.

She was folding and unfolding the same little blanket at the side of the bassinet.

Mommy, I said.

She stopped humming and looked at me.

Cinnamon, you’re home. Good. I was having labor pains this morning. It won’t be long now, she said.

Labor pains? But Mommy—

It’s expected, I know, but it’s still very difficult, Cinnamon. Most wonderful things are difficult, she muttered, and worth the pain, she added with a new smile.

How could she have forgotten she had just had a miscarriage? It was so sad, so tragic, I thought, and then: Maybe that’s why she’s forgotten. She doesn’t want to remember. She and I have done so much pretending in this house. This comes easily to her.

Mommy, you’ve got to return to bed.

I will as soon as I do this. I want everything to be ready when we come home with little Sacha, she said, gazing around the nursery.

Come back to bed, Mommy, I said, moving to her. I gently took her by the elbow. She smiled at me and put the blanket in the bassinet.

My grown-up little lady, taking care of me. You’re going to be such a big help with Sacha, I know. I’m as happy for you as I am for Daddy and me, she said. "Did you know I always wished I had a sister, especially a little sister who would look up to me for everything?

Sacha’s going to idolize you, Cinnamon. She’ll want to do everything you do just the way you do it, I’m sure. You mustn’t be short with her or impatient, she warned, her face full of concern. Always remember she’s just a little girl who doesn’t understand. Explain things; make sure you and she always talk and never hide anything from each other. A sister can be your best friend in the whole world, even more than your mother. I’m sure mine would have been.

She started out with me, but she didn’t stop talking.

It’s all right for her to be a better friend to you than I am. I’ll never be jealous of the two of you, honey. I realize you will have more in common with her than you will with me. You don’t ever have to worry about that.

Please get into bed, Mommy, I said when we entered the master bedroom.

Mommy and Daddy had a king-size, oak four-post bed with an oversized headboard on which two roses with their stems crossed were embossed. Mommy loved roses. The comforter and the pillow cases had a pattern of red roses, which made the room cheerful. When they were younger and more affectionate toward each other, I used to think of their bed as a bed that promised its inhabitants magical love, a bed that filled their heads with wonderful dreams when they slept afterward, both of them, smiling, contented, warm and secure, those four posts like powerful arms protecting them against any of the evil spirits that sought to invade their contentment.

I pulled back the comforter and she got into the bed, slowly lowering her head to the pillow. She was still smiling.

I want you to help take care of her right from the start, honey. You’ll be her second mother, just as Agatha Demerest was a second mother to her younger brothers and sisters, she said. Remember?

Mommy was referring to a story she and I had actually created during one of our earliest visits to the attic.

When I was a little more than fourteen, she decided one day that we should explore the house. She had been up in the attic before, of course, and told me that shortly after she and Daddy had moved into the house, she had discovered an old hickory chest with hinges so rusted, they fell off when she lifted the lid. The chest was filled with things that went back to the 1800s. She had been especially intrigued by the Demerest family pictures. Most were faded so badly you could barely make out the faces, but some of them were still in quite good condition.

Daddy, who works on Wall Street and puts a monetary value on everything in sight, decided that much of the stuff could be sold. He took things like the Union army uniform, old newspapers, a pair of spurs and a pistol holster to New York to be valued and later placed in a consignment store, but Mommy wouldn’t let him take the pictures.

I told him family pictures don’t belong in stores and certainly don’t belong on the walls of strangers. These pictures should never leave this house and they never will, she vowed to me.

She and I would look at the women and the men and try to imagine what they must have been like, whether they were sad or happy people, whether they suffered or not. We did our role-playing and I would assume the persona of one of the women in a picture. Mommy would often be Jonathan Demerest, speaking in a deep voice. That was when we came up with the story of Agatha Demerest having to take on the role of mother when her mother died of smallpox.

But Mommy was talking about it now as if it were historical fact and we had no concrete information upon which to base our assumptions, except for the dates carved in a couple of tombstones.

Okay, Mommy, I said. I was thinking about washing the lipstick drawing off her stomach, but I was afraid even to mention it.

I didn’t know what to do. I ran from the room. Grandmother Beverly was already at the top of the stairway.

What is it? she asked, her hand on her breast, her face whiter than ever.

She thinks she’s in labor. I think she really is in pain!

Oh dear, dear. We’ll have to call the doctor. I was hoping you could calm her down, get her to sleep and be sane, she said. Another scream from Mommy spun her around and sent her fleeing down the stairway.

Mommy continued to moan.

I glanced at my watch. Daddy had to be at his desk. Why did Grandmother Beverly say before that she certainly couldn’t reach him? He should be easy to reach.

I rushed to my room and tapped out the number for his office quickly. It rang and rang until his secretary finally picked up and announced his company.

I need to speak to my father immediately, I practically screamed.

Mommy was crying out even louder now, her shouts of pain echoing down the hallway and through the house.

He’s not here at the moment, the secretary said.

But he has to be. The market is still open.

I’m sorry, she said.

Where is he?

He didn’t leave a number, she said.

It’s an emergency, I continued.

Let me see if he answers his page, she relented. Why hadn’t she said that first? I wondered. I held on, my heart pounding a drum in my ears.

I’m sorry, she said. He’s not responding.

Keep trying and if you get him, tell him my mother is being taken to the hospital.

The hospital? Oh, dear. Oh, she said. Yes, I’ll keep trying.

I hung up just as Grandmother Beverly came up the stairs, looking more her age.

The doctor has called the ambulance, she said. She swallowed and continued. It’s no use. She has to return to the hospital. When I told him what she had done, he said he’d have her brought to the mental ward.

Mental ward?

Of course. Look at her behavior. That’s exactly where she belongs, she added with that damnable look of self-satisfaction I hated so much.

She put her hands over her ears, but Mommy’s heart-wrenching scream drove Grandmother Beverly back down the stairs to wait.

I was hoping it would drive her out of our lives.

2

Escape to Dreams

Apparently, Daddy’s secretary was unable to reach him before the ambulance arrived. I returned to Mommy’s bedroom and held her hand while she went through her imaginary labor pains. I guess I shouldn’t say imaginary. The doctor would emphasize later that she actually felt the pain.

Psychosomatic pain is not contrived, he explained to Daddy when Daddy and I met with him in the corridor of the hospital. The patient feels it; it’s just caused by something psychological as compared to something physical. He looked at me and added, We shouldn’t get angry at her.

I’m not angry at her, I snapped back at him. I’m upset.

I almost added, I’m frightened, too, but he got me so angry I didn’t want to confide in him.

Afterward, Daddy and I sat in the hospital cafeteria having a cup of coffee. Daddy said he hadn’t had a chance to eat anything so he nibbled on a Danish pastry.

When my secretary reached me, I was on my way home, he told me. I stopped at the train station and called and Grandmother answered and told me what was happening so I came back as quickly as I could and took a cab here. Lucky Grandmother was still in the house.

It wasn’t luck. Grandmother didn’t want to come along. I drove myself and followed the ambulance. I’m sure she was afraid she might be seen by one of her society friends, I muttered.

That’s not fair, Cinnamon. Your grandmother was never very good in hospitals. It makes her sick.

So? What better place to be sick if you have to be sick? I countered.

One thing Daddy wouldn’t ever get from me was sympathy for Grandmother Beverly. I never saw her shed a real tear, not even at Grandfather Carlson’s funeral, although I have seen her cry at sad scenes in her favorite old movies. She has a lock on the television set in the family room, fixing it on her old-time movie channel. She complains incessantly about today’s movies, television, music and books, calling it all depraved and claiming the most degenerate minds are responsible.

Occasionally, I would sit and watch an old movie with her. Some of them are very good, like Rebecca. I especially liked the scene where the evil housekeeper, Mrs. Danvers, tries to talk the second Mrs. de Winter into jumping to her death. The first time I saw it, I thought she was going to do it. Mrs. Danvers made it sound so inviting, I felt like jumping.

After I saw the movie, I began to think of Grandmother Beverly as our own Mrs. Danvers trying to talk Mommy into jumping off a cliff or at least helping drive her off the cliff of sanity into the bog of madness, where she now resided.

That’s not funny, Cinnamon, Daddy said. Some people have less tolerance for unpleasant things.

Grandmother Beverly? Weaker than other women? Please, Daddy, I said.

He blinked and nibbled on his Danish, quickly falling back to his relaxed demeanor. Daddy has a quiet elegance and charm. He is truly a handsome man with rich dark brown hair and the most striking hazel eyes I have seen on any man. He has those long eyelashes, too, and a perfect nose and firm mouth. He’s almost square-jawed with high cheek bones and a forehead that’s just wide enough to make him look very intelligent. He’s an impeccable dresser and never goes any longer than three weeks without having his hair trimmed.

I understood why Mommy once told me he was the most attractive man who had ever looked at her twice. When she did speak about the early romantic days between them, she emphasized his solid, even-tempered sensibility and how she had come to rely on him to keep her from going too far in one direction or another. Whatever happened to that? I wondered. It was almost as if he had abandoned ship.

Your mother could be here a while, he said. Or, she could be moved to a more comfortable place, a place that specializes in her problems.

You mean a nut house?

No, a clinic, he corrected sharply.

I looked away. Tears didn’t come into my eyes often, but when they did, I held them over my pupils tightly, battling to keep them locked behind my lids. I took deep breaths.

We’ve got to be strong, Daddy said. For her.

I looked at him. He was checking the time and looking toward the doorway.

I haven’t even learned about today’s market results. I hopped on the train as quickly as I could, he muttered.

Where were you, Daddy? Why weren’t you in your office? I thought you have to be there to call your clients while the market is open.

Sometimes, I go to visit a big account, he explained. It’s good politics. I have an assistant who does a good job covering for me.

How come you didn’t leave a telephone number where you could be reached?

I just forgot, he said. I left too quickly.

Lying is an art form, I thought. Good lying, that is. It requires almost the same techniques, skills and energy that good acting requires. When you tell lies, you step out of yourself for a while. You become another version of yourself and yet, you have to do it so that the listener believes it’s still you talking because he or she has come to trust you, have faith in you. I like making up stories, exaggerating, changing the truth a little—or maybe a little more than a little—sometimes just to see how much I can get away with. It’s all in how you hold your head, keep your eyes fixed on the listener and how much sincerity you can squeeze into the small places around the lie.

Maybe Daddy was a bad liar in person because he did most of his lying over the phone. He didn’t have to be face-to-face with his customers. He could quote statistics, talk in generalities, blame his mistakes on other people, other businesses or agencies than his own. It’s much easier to sound convincing when you talk to an ear and not a pair of eyes.

I knew Daddy was lying, but I didn’t know why. It never occurred to me what the reason might be. Maybe I was spending a little too much time in my make-believe world.

We’d better head home, he said. You’ve got schoolwork to do, I’m sure, and there is really nothing else we can do here tonight.

I want to go see her one more time, I said.

You might only disturb her more.

I might help her be comfortable in an uncomfortable place, I countered.

I could hold my gaze on Daddy so firmly that he would be the first to look away. Mommy taught me how to do that. You actually think of something else, but keep your eyes fixed on the subject.

All right, but make it quick, he said. I’m going to make a few phone calls.

He left and I went back upstairs. Mommy had been given a sedative to help her sleep, but she was still moaning and turning her head. I took her hand in mine and spoke softly to her.

Mommy, it’s me. Don’t you feel a little better now?

Baby…born too soon, she muttered.

What?

Little Sacha. She opened her eyes and looked up at me. Then she smiled.

Cinnamon! How is she? she asked. What have they told you?

I shook my head.

Now she believes she has given birth, I thought, but to a premature baby.

I know she’ll be all right. I know it. She’s in the prenatal intensive care unit, but premature babies can do fine. You tell me how she’s doing, all right? Tell me, she insisted, squeezing my hand tightly.

If I told her the truth, I thought she’d come apart right before my eyes, her hand crumbling in mine like a dry fall leaf.

She’s doing fine, Mommy. She’s getting bigger every moment.

She smiled.

"I knew it. I knew she would. How wonderful. How beautiful. She is beautiful, too,